1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and a system for automatic text processing. In particular, this invention relates to a method and system for generating a document summary with document navigation information.
2. Description of Related Art
Automatically generated document summaries serve a valuable function by reducing the time required to review documents. Conventional summaries, while providing a good indication of the total content of the summarized document, do not provide any means for accessing the content of the document. Therefore, if a reader is particularly interested in a certain portion of the summary, the reader is forced to scan the text of the entire document to locate the portions of the document that correspond to points of interest in the summary. There exists a need for assisting a reader in locating portions of a document that correspond to portions of the summary.
This invention generates a summary page that includes indicators that help the user find the corresponding place in the summarized document from which the summary information was extracted or to which the summary information is most related. This invention enables the user to navigate from the summary to the related locations in the document. This invention also highlights the portions of the document that have been extracted for the summary.
This invention connects the summary information with the contents of the summarized document by adding location information and/or navigation information to the summary. The method and the system of this invention work with conventional image or text document summarization systems by preserving the location information of the content that is extracted from a document and by generating a summary with indicators that indicate the corresponding locations in the document from which each portion of the summary was extracted. In one embodiment, these indicators indicate page and line numbers and have matching indicators within the summarized document.
This invention prepares a file from the document for input into a conventional document summarizer, receives the output from the automatic document summarizer and conditions the output to provide indicators to the output summary and document.
The indicators of this invention enable the user to quickly access the corresponding portions of the document that are related to the summary by directly accessing the document using the information indicated by the indicator or by locating a matching indicator within the outputted document. This task is made easier by highlighting the extracted portions within the outputted document.
This invention uses an automatic summarizer, linked to a device that can identify the page image and page location in the original document where the summary material is located. The location information is generated by a conventional or modified text or image summarizer. In image summarization, a page number can be found by applying image matching methods. In the case of text summarization, conventional printing software can be modified such that the page numbers assigned by it are made known to the software implementing the present invention.